3 Para. Patrick Bishop
I thought, if we have got this amount of interest and as a lot of the elders involved with the school are on side, there is definitely hope.
Blair’s first thought was that ‘we must look after the kids. The kids are gagging for education and for extra supplies so I thought, we have delivered on that one.’ But fear of the Taliban loomed over everything. The teachers told Blair how they received letters threatening them with death if they taught little girls. He nonetheless felt that ‘if we can sort out security and some supplies we can at least nail the education bit. Gereshk, I thought, was a success waiting to happen.’
The arrival of a new CIMIC officer in the middle of May seemed an encouraging development. Captain Emma Couper had been on the point of leaving the army to go to a job in the UN when the abrupt return of her predecessor created a vacancy. ‘As a female officer, to get an opportunity to go out to the headquarters of a Parachute Regiment battalion comes along once in a lifetime,’ she said, ‘and although all my friends thought I was nuts, when I said, “Well, would you turn it down?” they all said, “No.”’
Most of the women attached to the Paras were medics or administrators. Couper went into the army after studying English literature at Manchester University, where she joined the Officer Training Corps, mainly for the sport and outdoor adventure it offered – she played rugby and went climbing. Both her parents had been in the army, though they were out by the time she was born. For her first year at university, she had no intention of following them. Then in the second year, after doing some army attachments, ‘all the pieces started to fit in. I really liked those I worked with. I didn’t want a nine-to-five job. I wanted to travel and I wanted to work with people.’ To her OTC buddies it seemed a natural progression. Most of them followed suit. Her other friends ‘had different values. Maybe they were more materialistic. They wanted to have more control over their lives.’ Her work in CIMIC had taken her to Bosnia in the nineties, Afghanistan in 2002 and most recently Iraq, where she liaised between the divisional headquarters and the local population.
She arrived in Bastion on 10 May and met Stuart Tootal, who thought she seemed ‘enthusiastic, bright and experienced’. They agreed on the need for projects that not only delivered benefits but also put money in local pockets, such as digging new roadside drains.
Once in Gereshk she went out on patrols, ‘establishing relationships with the key leaders, getting them in for meetings and starting to build a database of information that we could push up to Brigade and give them an idea of what was going on on the ground. The basics of water, electricity, power and all the things which potentially the larger agencies from the US and UN might in the long term get involved with’.
But all this depended on improving security, and it was clear to her that there was a very long way to go before real changes could be made. The police force were corrupt and malleable. Some of the twenty-two checkpoints set up at the entrances to the town were ostensibly run by the police but in fact subcontracted to gunmen. The police sat inside their posts while their hirelings extorted money from everyone passing through.
Attempts to instil some training and sense of duty had been discouraging. The course was four or five weeks long and was held in Kandahar, 80 miles away. The men were unhappy at being away from home and tended to run away after a few days.
Even with resources available, the Paras’ experience so far told them that sorting out Gereshk would be a hard and tricky task. The time was coming, though, when all their manpower and assets would be needed for a tougher job.
By the second week in May, all the elements of 3 Para had arrived in Bastion. Tootal felt he now had a battle group to command, although he was still waiting for some of his gunners and engineers and all of the HCR’s D Squadron. The engineers in place were making constant improvements to the camp. Bastion was expanding all the time. No one could complain about the conditions now. There were rows of air-conditioned tents connected by duckboard runways. Soldiers could get their laundry done, eat decent food and call home on the welfare phones. Mobile phones had to be surrendered on arrival, for ‘operational security’ reasons. There was also a high risk that homesick Toms would run up crippling bills calling their loved ones in the UK.
At night you could sit outside a Western-style coffee shop, enjoying the relative coolness, drinking Cokes and smoking. Bastion was a cigarette-friendly zone, with men and women sparking up with abandon. Booze was another matter. The camp, like every other military facility in the area, was dry.
Tootal thought the time was now right to start delivering the ‘Sangin effect’. This was his plan to expand the British presence northwards into the towns and villages that ran along Helmand’s river valleys. It would deliver the British government’s wish to ‘deny terrorists an ungoverned space’. Discussions went on throughout April between the battle group and the Canadian forces in neighbouring Kandahar province as to how this could be done.
The intention was given impetus by the new governor of Helmand, Engineer Mohammed Daoud. The appointment of Daoud appeared to be proof of the central government’s resolve to bring order to the province. He was a ‘technocrat’ from the east of Afghanistan who had headed an NGO distributing wheat to the poor before the arrival of the Taliban. He was forced to flee over the Pakistan border to Quetta, where he met and became close to Hamid Karzai. His reputation contrasted favourably with that of his predecessor. Sher Mohammed Akhunzada had been forced out of office by pressure from NATO. Suspicions that he was a player in the drugs trade seemed confirmed, early in 2006, when counter-narcotics agents raided his offices and discovered nearly 9 tons of raw opium. His own men had seized the dope, he explained, and he was just on the point of handing it in. He was given the consolation prize of a seat in the upper house of the national assembly. To placate the powerful Akhunzada family, his brother, Amir, was put in as Daoud’s deputy.
Daoud was considered to be as honest as it was possible to be in the treacherous and venal world of Afghan politics. He was a Pashtun, like most people in Helmand, but had no strong tribal affiliations. He was close to President Karzai and was identified with the forces of progress and modernity. ‘He was the right man for the job,’ said Ed Butler. ‘He was a developer. He was a reconstructor. He could think long term.’ He was also very insistent that the British were there to support him and that he had a right to call on their resources to shore up his authority wherever it was challenged.
Daoud had formed the unfortunate belief that the battle group was much more powerful than it in fact was. He assumed that the great majority of the 3,300 soldiers arriving in Helmand would be ‘bayonets’ and that, in the words of a senior British officer, ‘there were going to be three thousand Paras running around all over the place’. The number of fighting soldiers in the battle group, including the Royal Irish, the Gurkhas and, later, the Fusiliers, was less than a third of the overall number. The others were there to support them. Try as they might, British commanders never succeeded in managing Daoud’s extravagant expectations.
Daoud was also frustrated by the battle group’s late arrival. The deployment had been delayed while the Dutch prevaricated over their contribution to the NATO effort in southern Afghanistan. As a result, said Daoud, there was a ‘security gap’ in Helmand, which the Taliban were now exploiting energetically. Encouraged by the security vacuum, they had been arriving in large numbers from exile in Pakistan and were urging local leaders to join them in a holy war. Four out of the twelve district police chiefs had been killed in the six months before the Paras arrived. In the spring of 2006, the outlying northern district of Baghran fell under insurgent control.
The British plan was to secure the Triangle, then gradually extend their presence northwards up the heavily populated Helmand river valley as conditions and resources allowed. The obvious place from which to begin delivering the ‘Sangin effect’ was a bleak desert camp, a few miles south of Sangin town, called FOB Robinson, which had been built by the